Author:  porschecm2  Posted:  Jan 25, 2024 01:40  Subject:  Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants  Viewed:  50 times  Topic:  Catalog Cancel Reply

BrickLink ID Card porschecm2 (170) Location:  USA, Washington Member Since Contact Type Status Mar 10, 2004 Seller   Store: Ice Planet Express

This would be a very bad idea. I would love to see many updates to the catalog, but merging existing variants is not one of them. You say these "don't seem to be that important" but that many other variants are staying. Who made that determination? Because most variants don't matter most of the time--until they do matter. A secondary market site like Bricklink should recognize as many variations as possible, even when LEGO itself doesn't make a distinction (and, I'd argue, especially because they do not!). Some of these variants are very important indeed, like the minifigure torsos, click hinges, or axle holes, which are historically or functionally distinct. This seems like the worst possible solution to the problem of a complicated catalog. I'm sure the more obvious solutions such as creating and linking a variant-neutral entry in addition to the existing variants would be challenging and bring its own issues, but losing *decades* of valuable history and the ability to selectively buy older elements is not the correct solution. (And yes, I'm aware that sellers can still add notes. That's an awful solution and everyone knows it. Just to begin with, once you've merged the catalog entries and the old entries have been deleted, how will anyone even know to sort the variants, let alone to search for them? And then there's the whole problem)

Message is in Reply To:

Important proposal regarding catalog variants - Admin_Russell

Hello everyone, As a platform, we have decided to take a hard look at some of the mold variants that we are currently asking you to recognize. For sellers, more variants means [...] (5 months ago, Jan 9, 2024, to Catalog)

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